Explain (sell?) Apocalypse World ruleset to me (1 Viewer)

I haven't been buying too many games as of late (read: years), so I'm asking a question is not exactly informed or sophisticated. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I have seen people refer to Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, and other *World Rpgs as being based on an interesting and innovative ruleset (I dunno if thats the right terminology, but I'm sure it's obvious what I mean). I'm curious what makes its rules so distinctive?

The problem with trying to find this info on my own is it means trying to not just find reviews, but then read the reviews and hope I found a well written review that discusses the rules in a way I can wrap my head around. Since that's sometimes a tall order, I started by asking here.

The biggest concept in *World games is 'Moves'. Moves are narrative actions like any other RPG, but how they are used and resolved is codified, as well as adding hooks into the story. Generally, 2d6 plus a modifier is rolled, and the effects differ on if you got a 6 or less, between a 7 and a 9, or more than 10. 6 is a failure of some sort, 7-9 is passing with complications, and 10+ is passing.

For example, there could be a move called 'Investigate', which goes along the lines of "When you search a location for clues, roll +Mind. On 6-, you find nothing. On 7-9, you find a clue that the GM tells you. On a 10+, you find a clue and you gain +1 forward to act on that clue"

*World games run the gamut in difficulty, crunchiness and abstractness. Worlds in Peril, the new supers games, uses very abstract descriptions in order to replicate superpowers. Something like Sixth World, however, is crunchy and full of gear porn

Another big draw are the Playbooks, which are basically classes. To me they seem a bit more balanced than traditional classes, but *World settings are narrative at their heart

Interesting.

However - and I strongly suspect this is because I'm very tired - I think I'm missing something.

You've described actions that are based on 2d6, plus a stat, and also that it has classes called playbooks. I don't think I'm seeing the distinctiveness there?

Probably the easiest way to find out would be to go and read Dungeon World.

http://www.dungeonworldsrd.com/

To be honest I think the thing that made it click for me was Monsterhearts. To the untrained eye, Dungeon World can look like a slightly more prescriptive D&D.

Monsterhearts is what sold me on the *World system in a huge way. Monsterhearts is MUCH more lightweight than Apocalypse World or Dungeon World, it's the engine boiled down to its most fundamental goodness.

The thing the *World engine excels at is letting you focus in on what the bloody juicy guts of your story are, and then to keep that story moving and jumping. Monsterhearts doesn't give a shit about skill checks, equipment, or anything else unless it's something central to teenage high school drama. So it has no moves for stealth, pickpocketing, disguise, lockpicking, athletics, or other broad swathes of traditional RPG fare. It cares very much about attempts to manipulate people, seduce them, shut them down, hang tough in the face of adversity, lash out, run away from trouble, and figure out what to do next. Whenever you describe your character doing one of those things, the rules kick in and make you roll to see what happens. On a 10+, you probably get what you wanted! And maybe even a benny on top of that! On the VASTLY more common 7-9, you probably get what you want, but you get to pick your poison on the side-- the 7-9 results are like credit card debt, in that they almost always come with some kind of wrinkle or complication that is going to make life interesting either later on or right the hell now.

Essentially, the entire point of the game is not to guide your character to triumph, it's to keep the story and characters careening from disaster to disaster, from one dramatic cluster-fuck to the next, creating the next mess in the process of resolving the current one. Just like being a teen and trying to figure your life out, as it resolutely squirms around and refuses to be quite what you expected or wanted it to be, you know? For example, you might try to shut down some bully by shit-talking him, and you roll an 8. Well, you do indeed succeed in flustering him, and you learn something about him you can use against him later (you get a String on him, in game terms)-- but he sees you letting some of the ugly side of yourself out in the process, so he gets a String on you too.

The "powers" in the game work along the same design lines, too. My favorite example is the vampire's "feeding" move. When you drink someone's blood, you have to pick two results off the following list:
-You get 1 "Health Point" back
-You get a +1 to apply to a roll later in the scene
-Your victim doesn't die

Essentially, the *World engine asks the players to constantly make decisions that add extra drama-fuel to the story, or that offer personal rewards on one hand and mechanical gain on the other.

The innovation I see is threefold:

1. It tells you exactly how to GM it so that its advertised play experience happens reliably. It goes so far to make these rules the GM must follow, just like the other players. The effect does not seem innovative if you already GM games the way it says to, but it means that a GM following the GM rules will run an enjoyable game whether they have 20 years experience with RPGs or this is their first time GMing ever.
2. The resolution mechanic (which dovetails with the GM rules already mentioned) makes sure that something happens to move the game forward, no matter the result of the roll. Failure and success lead to meaningful and different outcomes, but both are equally interesting.
3. It does all that while requiring zero prep from anyone, apart from the GM reading and understanding the rules before the first session. The playbooks are part of this: they group can sit down completely cold and have ready-to-play characters who are tied to each other and the starting situation in less time than it takes for pizza to be delivered. The GM rules also enable this: prepared plots are forbidden, and improvisation techniques are hardcoded right into the GM rules so that you can pull off a fully improvised game session even if you have zero improv experience.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I quite like the engine. I like how little prep it takes, how it draws the players inexorably into the game, and how it is reliably fun despite nobody at the table having put any previous work into it.

People have said that its not really that innovative, and in a sense they're right: none of these things are completely new RPG "technology." But the particular combination is innovative, and it's a tightly-woven package that works reliably to do what it claims to do, and other people appreciate that enough that there has been a small explosion of games based on the engine. It is definitely worth checking out, even if only to better understand what so many people are excited about.

LibraryLass said:

To be honest I think the thing that made it click for me was Monsterhearts. To the untrained eye, Dungeon World can look like a slightly more prescriptive D&D.

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That's a good call. It's not free on the internet, unfortunately.
It is pretty cheap, though, so if the OP wants to take a punt on buying one *W game, Monsterhearts would be a good choice.

Nick the Nevermet said:

Interesting.

However - and I strongly suspect this is because I'm very tired - I think I'm missing something.

You've described actions that are based on 2d6, plus a stat, and also that it has classes called playbooks. I don't think I'm seeing the distinctiveness there?

Click to expand...

Distinctive things:

The DM never rolls, only the players do.

There is a static difficulty; 6 or less is always a failure, 7-9 is always a partial success, 10 or more is always a full success.

There are very concrete explanations of what failure, success, and partial success mean, much more so than in other games. A player Move will tell you what Move the DM will use to respond to a failure, and it will allow the player to choose from a couple of options on a partial success.

Partial successes are essentially "You succeed BUT choose a bad thing from the following list."

There's a lot of stuff that's done in a "pick two from the list" format like Holden mentioned:

-You get 1 "Health Point" back
-You get a +1 to apply to a roll later in the scene
-Your victim doesn't die

Click to expand...

They're generally well-written and give a lot more concrete guidance on how things move forward than a lot of other games.

Playbooks are classes, but there's generally not much customization; you assign a few stats, choose from a short list of powers for that playbook, and boom, done. It's like the character classes in early D&D in that way.

It's a really good system for play by post because there's not the back and forth you get in so many other systems, where you have to tell the GM what you're doing, then the GM sets a difficulty, then you roll, then you decide if you want to spend points to boost the roll, then the other players decide if THEY want to spend points... I've had some bad experiences.

I like the engine, but it's not a generic system, and none of the games made for it are for genres that I enjoy. Actually, because of the Moves and the specific consequences each Move has, most games are for pretty specific genres. Apocalypse World, for all that you're not supposed to plan before you play, does seem to have pretty concrete assumptions about how the Apocalypse works; I think it would be a pretty iffy system if you wanted to play Fallout, and Gamma World or Low Life are pretty much just not going to happen at all.

Great fun for the GM, too, because you never, ever have to roll anything. Is the PC in a fight with some dudes? His/her player does all the rolling, and you just adjudicate and deal out damage as appropriate. The GM (known as "MC" for some reason") also has Moves, but the Moves are basically ways to move the story along and put the characters in a bind, like "Separate Them" or "Take Their Stuff Away" or "Reveal Future Badness".

I love Apocalypse World, but the new game Urban Shadows has a very nice version of the rules and lots and lots of worked examples of how the rules work in different situations.